


Unrequited Love Sutra

by Rotpeach



Category: Boyfriend to Death (Visual Novel)
Genre: Asphyxiation, Japanese Mythology & Folklore, Naga, Other, POV Second Person, Reader-Insert, Rough Sex, Snakes, Threats
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-08-23
Updated: 2016-08-23
Packaged: 2018-08-10 14:47:46
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,136
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/7849309
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Rotpeach/pseuds/Rotpeach
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In Japanese folklore, the snake is a creature of covetousness.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Unrequited Love Sutra

**Author's Note:**

> hi im rotpeach here to bring my folklore fetish to new and exciting places
> 
> this is actually kind of mild for the source material lol but i hope its still enjoyable

Sano tells you that you were unlucky.

“Unlucky,” he says it twice as though it bears repeating, smiling in amusement, “That’s all it took, really.”

You can blame it on anything you want—your youth, your foolhardiness, your perceived invincibility that sends you down dark alleys alone in the night and wakes you in strangers’ bathrooms, sprawled on vomit-covered carpets with a bitter, acidic taste in your mouth—but it all comes down to being in the wrong place at the wrong time. Of all the people in the world you could have been sitting next to at the bar, it had to be the one who was thinking of how to take you apart one tendon at a time.

“But in the end, we were both fortunate,” he says.  He stands beside the examination table with his hands in the pockets of his lab coat, an appraising look in his cold eyes as they wander your body.  Once, you might’ve shied away from his gaze, but you know now how to tell the difference between lust and cold, clinical fascination.  He sees neither bedmate nor prey now, but he does see _potential_ , beauty where you have never seen anything special.  Maybe that’s what really made you stay.

“So,” he says, tone becoming more conversational, and you know what’s coming before the words even come out, “Do you feel ready for the procedure today?”

Wooden doll limbs lay strewn across his workspace, ball-jointed, fingers articulated, stiff yet elegant.  You try not to look at them.

“I don’t know,” you say.

Sano pulls a chair over from his desk to sit with you, grabbing one of your arms without a word and staring down at your skin.  “You promised me you would do this,” he murmurs, thumbs pressing down on your veins, and though you find his insistence that you _promised_ almost petulant, you know there’s weight behind those words; a real, tangible threat.

Truthfully, it was just something you’d said in the heat of the moment—in panic and in fear—without any thought of the consequences.  You thought the tremble in your shoulders and the nervous wavering in your voice should have rendered it meaningless, but Sano had taken your words to heart.

(“I love dolls,” he’d said; madly, passionately.  

He’d paced with his hands behind his back, speaking more to himself than to you.  “Of course, it would be ideal to heighten the sensations for you, but maybe this is the sort of thing best done spontaneously.  Overthinking art ruins it completely, don’t you think?”

“I...I don’t….”

He was smiling, head tilted to the side as he looked at you in adoration, and again he wasn’t really looking at you but moving through a waking dream, a fantasy that was finally within his reach.  Slowly, he began to reach for the array of surgical tools laid out on his workspace, which is when it really sunk in.

 _He’s really going to do this,_ you thought frantically, _he’s really going to cut my legs and arms off._

“Wait,” you'd stammered, “It’s okay to think about it a little bit, isn’t it?  We need to do this right the first time so everything really is perfect.  I want to be completely ready.”

Stalling is all it was, stalling for time, just trying to squeeze one more day of normalcy out of this nightmare.  You were afraid of his dreams of perfection.  You were afraid of the lengths he would go to.  You were afraid of never feeling again.

He’d frozen then, and you thought briefly that it wouldn’t matter, that you had finally rocked the boat a bit too hard and were staring death in the face.

“I promise,” you’d added, quickly and thoughtlessly, just one more minute, _just one more second please_ , “I’ll go through with it.  Just give me some time to mentally prepare.”

He nods, and you feel that you can breathe again.  “Yes,” he’d agreed, “No anesthetic, but a bit of planning.  Spontaneity might not be the best way to go about this.”  He’d wrapped his arms around you, held you close enough that you could hear the beating of his heart, and somehow that just made it worse; _how could someone with a beating heart do this_ ?  “It has to be perfect,” he whispered, “ _You_ have to be perfect.”  When he leaned back, he was smiling again, his visible eye filled with the purest love you had ever seen, childlike and unconditional, as he saw not what was but what could be.

And in that moment, you came to fear him more than ever before.)

He rests a gloved hand on your shoulder, smiling absently.  “You don’t really intend to go back on your word now, do you?” he asks.

You say nothing; you have no answer to give him.  

(Not the one he wants.)

His smile falls and his grip grows harsh, fingertips digging into your flesh.  There would be new indigo bruises there in the future, like catmint and hydrangeas blooming beneath your skin, pale and blotchy; rites of passage from when you had pushed too much.  

“No,” you say, but only when you’re certain that his touch has left a mark, and you don’t quite meet his eyes when his hand falls on your knee instead.  You notice the shift then when your eyes met, the soft reddening at his cheeks as his hand begins to move up your leg.  You reach up and cup his face in your hands, urging him to meet you halfway for a chaste kiss, and gasp into his mouth when you feel cool latex between your thighs, teasing your warm flesh.  You hear yourself whimpering but don’t believe it’s really you, don’t think you could be writhing and keening, pulling at his coat so desperately, but you want to really feel this, want to remember it.  Sano helps you off of the examination table and onto his lap on the floor.  He smiles, licking his lips, tongue black and eyes filled with wanting.

(In Japanese folklore, the snake is a creature of covetousness, of jealousy and greed and wanting.

You read that somewhere, probably for a mythology class way back in your first year, and you didn’t hardly appreciate what you were being taught.  In that story, the lady Kiyohime was in unrequited, impossible love with an itinerant monk whose passion was doomed to fade.  He swore he was done with Kiyohime, that he would never return to see her again, and Kiyohime’s gentle, pure loved turned to rage.)

Sano‘s hands wander teasingly down your chest as he licks a hot trail up your neck, eagerly suckling at an uneven red ring around your throat, butterfly-shaped, perfectly matching the outline of his hands pressed to your flesh.  “You’re already beautiful,” he says, and through a haze of pleasure you hear snakeskin moving over the cold, stone floor; faintly, you feel him changing beneath you.  “But you could be so much more.  You could be _perfect._ ”

( _“You could be mine,_ ” Kiyohime screams, and you see her standing at the riverbank in your mind’s eye, the edges of her kimono tattered and her bare feet bloodied with thorns and brambles.   _“You could stay here, with me, and we would never be unhappy.”_  But the monk pretends he can’t hear her, pays the boatman and drifts away.  She watches him leave her behind, tears rolling down her cheeks, fire reflected in her narrowing eyes.)

Sano’s breath is hot on your skin, nearly scorching, and the crushing weight of his tail coiling around your body steals your breath, grip tight enough that ribs must be cracking and organs must be bruising, but each hoarse word from his lips makes a pleased shiver run down your spine.  “It’ll be even better without anesthetic,” he says, hopeful, wistful, “If you can move, you’ll contract your muscles and try to fight.  It might hurt more that way.”  You feel something pulsing and engorged—forked, even, with two distinct heads and prickling barbs all along the sides—rubbing against your thigh and find Sano panting, one arm draped over your shoulder to keep you close, the other hand at your face caressing your cheek.

“The pain,” he whispers, black and silver eye glinting like the full moon over the Hidaka River as Kiyohime wades into the tide, “Will make you even more beautiful.”

You feel him start to breach your entrance, muscles straining and protesting, and he swallows your shuddering groan of pain in a searing kiss, saliva dripping down your chin.  You’ve done this before but you never quite get used to it; every time, you become panicked, heart racing and sweat dotting your brow that he laps away with his tongue, overwhelmed by the instinct of prey that tells you he’s going to devour you.

Sano is overcome with passion as he always is when you join together like this and doesn’t even think to wait for you to adjust.  His lower body undulates and you feel the barbs scraping against your inner walls, something tearing as the dull ache of the stretch becomes a terrible burning sensation, blood slicking your thighs.  You can’t even see what’s happening with the coils of his tail obscuring your vision of your own legs, but you know you’re hot—unbearably, uncomfortably, _burning alive_ hot—and you wheeze, trying to get more air into your lungs, but even the air feels thick and choking.

( _“Hide here,”_ the monks of Dojoji tell Kiyohime’s love, ushering him beneath the large temple bell, “ _Don’t look, no matter what.  Just stay still.”_  But they are fools who know nothing of serpents, their envy and their malice and their desire to hold all the world in their coils.  Kiyohime knows he is within the bell the moment she arrives because she knows her love, knows the sound of his fearful heartbeat and the cadence of his panicked breathing, and she wraps herself around the temple bell and _squeezes._ )

“Hurts,” you whimper, hardly able to get any words out, and push weakly against his chest.

He ignores your ineffectual struggles, consumed by his desire to possess you completely.  “I know,” he whispers.

Sano’s hands closed around your throat, nails scraping your skin, the pads of his thumbs pushing down hard on your windpipe.  Fear shoots through you and you reach for him, hands finding his shoulders even as you convulse beneath his hands, and you follow his tense muscles down his arm to his wrists.

( _“You promised,”_ Kiyohime hisses, _“You promised loyalty and love, a shared lifetime._

 _You promised me.”_ )

But you don’t try to push him away.  You cover his hands with your own, urging him on.

You feel him impossibly deep inside of you, feel like you’re being torn in two, feel things shifting that shouldn’t ever shift, things being touched that should never, ever feel anything touching them, and you can’t think of anything but Kiyohime and her all-encompassing rage; a fire so strong it melted metal and bone, a love so strong it made a monster.

You didn’t understand then, you didn’t get it at all, but you do now.

“Beautiful,” you hear Sano murmur as you begin to see spots, vision darkening, “Perfect.  A doll of my own.”

You know you were wrong.  You were never in any danger of being eaten, only burned.  You hold on tighter, nails sliding over snakeskin, and try to sear this memory into your mind to hold onto forever—the bruises that spring up like weeds in an untended garden, crescent-shaped nail marks and hypodermic needle pinpricks, red rings around wrists and ankles from metal cuffs and firm hands.

Soon, there will only be smooth, even-grained oak that neither of you will want to damage, so you relish this, treasure this, _covet it with the greed of a serpent_ , while it lasts.

*

“So, about the procedure,” you say.

Sano glances back, slipping his lab coat over his shoulders.  You wonder what he sees when he looks at you now, scrapes and bruises and red, red, red, spider lilies dotting the shore of the Hidaka River.

“I’m ready.”

He looks surprised.  “Are you sure?”

You nod.

For the briefest of moments, you think you see something like warmth creep into his eyes, but it could just be your imagination desperately searching for something comforting in his gaze, something human.

(“ _I will be with you,”_ the monk says to Kiyohime by lamplight, on a night before it all went so very wrong, _“I will never leave you.  This I promise.”_ )

You thought that Kiyohime deserved her vengeance, and perhaps she did.  You had been angry with the monk, thinking, “Well, what did he think would happen, lying like that?”  

Now, you are determined to learn from his mistakes.


End file.
